What scientists would like to tell you about reprogramming (if only they knew!)

Michele Boiani and José B. Cibelli

Münster, Germany and East Lansing, MI, USA

ABSTRACT In a famous Science editorial entitled "Will Society Be Prepared?", Nobel Laureate Marshall Nirenberg envisioned the possibility that cells would be "programmed with synthetic messages within 25 years" (Nirenberg, 1967). Whether Nirenberg held messenger RNAs capable as such of (re)programming cells, is not known, but clearly he considered them as instrumental to achieve (re)programming...